Ben Marwood comes to Manchester’s Gullivers on 16 April, following today’s release of Get Found (via Xtra Mile Recordings).
The show sees him performing with label mates Non Canon and with support from Helen Chambers.
Get Found has been a long time in the making. After the successes of debut album Outside There’s A Curse (2011) and the follow-up Back Down (2013) alongside a sold out solo headline UK tour; a support run with Frank Turner across the US, and the very surreal spectacle of accompanying Mr Turner upon rolling green hills at his pre-show performance of the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony – Ben wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to or even want to play music again.
A very intense year-long illness stopped Ben in his tracks and even though 2014-2015 was a surprisingly productive year of writing new songs, life continued to intervene, and this promising musician spent a year “embracing horizontal living”.
A third album was anything but inevitable at that point. Yet here we are, in 2017, warmly welcoming another Ben Marwood record. The album doesn’t stray far from its roots but plays with them tenderly. Pedal steel aches on Enraptured, while DNFTTTS is pure andante piano melody. Nights chugs and spits before bellowing into the most uplifting-sounding chorus about death you’ve heard yet – and there are plenty to come. “I’m not dead, I’m not dying, I just can’t get up,” confesses Ben on ‘I’m Wide Awake It’s Boring’ as one of just two songs that directly reference his mental and physical state of that difficult year. But Ben’s still able to pull his best from just his familiar flowing fingerstyle and disarmingly affecting voice on ‘Bones’ and ‘Bury Me In the Pantheon’.
Ben Marwood performs at Gullivers, Manchester, on 16 April 2017.
